The Biden administration announced today that it’s investing $1.7 billion to retool or retrofit 11 auto factories across the country, to build electric vehicles and EV components like batteries and other systems. All 11 factories had either been closed or were in danger of going out of business as the auto industry shifts its manufacturing capacity away from internal-combustion engines to EVs.
I Sing The Body (And Chassis) Electric
The factories are in eight states, including five that will be key battlegrounds in the fall election — Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia — as well as in the decidedly blue states of Maryland and Illinois, and the very red state of Indiana. The grants are still subject to negotiations with automakers before they’re awarded.
In a statement, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said,
There is nothing harder to a manufacturing community than to lose jobs to foreign competition and a changing industry. Even as our competitors invest heavily in electric vehicles, these grants ensure that our automotive industry stays competitive—and does it in the communities and with the workforce that have supported the auto industry for generations.
This is a heckin’ big deal in terms of promoting the transition away from fossil fuels, one part of which involves electrifying the transportation industry, which is currently America’s biggest source of greenhouse emissions.
Also too: Don’t believe the bullshit about EV sales declining. For the second straight quarter this year, US EV sales have continued to increase, albeit not at the breakneck 40 percent growth rate seen at the start of 2023. (Also, feel free to enjoy some Elonfreude: While EV sales are up overall, by about 11.3 percent over last year, Tesla Motors’ share of the EV market dipped below 50 percent for the first time, partly due to increasing competition from other brands, and probably due in no small part to CEO Elon Musk’s rebranding as an internet toxic waste dump.)
As The Verge notes, the funding to boost factory retooling efforts comes from “a larger $15.5 billion program administered by the Department of Energy, announced late last year, that seeks to retrofit existing manufacturing facilities into EV and clean vehicle assembly operations.” That program is yet another of the many initiatives under the Biden-Harris administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or as we like to call it, Joe Biden’s Big Fucking Climate Law.
Among the retooling/renovation projects being funded are a Stellantis plant in Belvidere, Illinois (motto: “We spell it that way to annoy you”) that formerly built gasoline-powered Jeeps. It will be reopened as an EV assembly plant, thanks not only to the federal grant, but also as part of Stellantis’s concessions to the United Auto Workers during last year’s strike. Another Stellantis facility, a transmission plant in Kokomo, Indiana, will be retooled to build electric drivetrain components, seeing as how modern EVs don’t have “transmissions” or a lot of the other mechanical shit that break down all the time in our old fossilburners.
Also too, the Verge ‘splains,
General Motors will get $500 million to reconstitute its 25-year-old factory in Lansing, Michigan, into one that will produce electrified models. A Harley-Davidson facility in York, Pennsylvania, that also makes electric motorcycles will expand for future EV production with $89 million. And the Blue Bird Corporation, which makes school buses, will get $79 million to upgrade a 600,000-square-foot facility in Fort Valley, Georgia, for the production of electric buses.
There are some very good strings attached to the retooling funds, too: As with other parts of the Biden-Harris climate agenda, the funds have to include retaining and creating new union jobs in the EV sector. As the Washington Post points out (gift link), all the facilities getting the grants are unionized, “unlike many EV plants in Southern states less friendly to union labor.”
Biden said in a statement Thursday that “Building a clean energy economy can and should be a win-win for union autoworkers and automakers,” and noted, without naming Donald Trump, that the communities that are home to these plants “were left behind by my predecessor and are now making a comeback with the support of my policies.”
Trump, of course, constantly lies about EVs and clean energy, and has promised to roll back every last bit of Biden’s climate policies that he can, even the ones that have boosted manufacturing jobs. Or especially those, maybe. That’s a major plank in Project 2025, the Republicans’ plan for a second Trump term, even if Trump insists he’s never met Project 2025 but thinks it may have fetched coffee at one or two meetings, and then he mistook a photo of Project 2025 for one of his ex-wives.
The Only ‘Left Behind’ We Care About
Say, speaking of how good the Biden-Harris administration has been for the economy, you should also check out this analysis of how good the last three years have been for “left-behind counties” — not places where the Rapture didn’t happen, because that’s everywhere, but counties whose economic and population growth lagged behind the rest of the nation’s from 2000 to 2016.
To be sure, these socially distressed places haven’t suddenly become rich, or even caught up with growth in the rest of the country. But they’re also doing better than they have at any point in this century, a hopeful indicator for the administration’s emphasis on growing the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out.”
Between 2016 and 2019, annual job growth in these counties averaged only 0.4 percent, less than one-third the national rate. By the start of 2020, fewer than one-third had recovered all the jobs they lost during the Great Recession, which ended more than a decade earlier.
However, between 2020 and 2023, jobs in left-behind counties grew more than four times faster than in the four previous years—and nearly half of these counties have already regained all the jobs they shed during the COVID downturn.
Unfortunately, these areas are “still making up lost ground from decades of stagnation. Fewer workers are now employed in these counties than almost a quarter-century ago.”
That means campaigning in these areas, many in swing states, will be tricky: It’ll require acknowledging that the economy left them behind for too long, along with pointing to some very concrete examples of how that’s finally changing under Biden and Harris, and giving voters in those areas reason to stick with the team that, for example, is bringing new, good-paying jobs to the Wisconsin site of the Foxconn factory that never materialized under Donald Trump.
[The Verge / NYT / US Department of Energy / WaPo (gift link) / Economic Innovation Group]
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Say Biden's old and senile and cuckoo. Maybe he is, but I don't really think so... Trump absolutely is. Biden has an administration that won't enable him to be a vengeful lunatic. Trump is surrounded by idiots, especially this time, that will absolutely be obsequiesce, vengeful little toadies that will enable all his worst impulses.
OK, but what if you're driving one of these EVs and you accidentally drive it into the ocean. Do you stay with the car and get electrocuted or get eaten by a shark? Nobody's ever asked that question. Such a great question. My uncle was at MIT and was tenured there the longest, very strongly tenured. I have good genes.